The Royal Art Lodge
The Royal Art Lodge, Summer 2003, pp. 88-90
Melissa Kuntz writes:
“The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust” is an exhibition of work created collaboratively by a tight-knit group of Winnipeg artists. The Royal Art Lodge’s drawings, costumes, sculptures, videos and puppets, curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Joseph R. Wolin, were exhibited alongside the members’ solo projects.
Marcel Dzama, Drue Langlois, Myles Langlois, Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier and Hollie Dzama along with founding members Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams—who have since moved on to individual careers in Los Angeles and Montreal respectively—constitute The Royal Art Lodge. The witty, often twisted dialogue that ensues between the artists in their drawings is a playground for the Lodge members. The practice of drawing emerges as an infinitely malleable and adaptable medium, perfectly fitted to a generation of twentysomething artists who are well versed in contemporary throwaway culture. The drawings are often made on letter paper, the puppets crudely and haphazardly constructed, yet The Royal Art Lodge’s prodigious output—thousands of drawings in seven years together—suggests an ironic commitment to the ephemeral nature of their production.
The members of the original Lodge met at art school and soon expanded to include Hollie Dzama, Marcel’s sister, who was only 12 when she joined. The Art Lodge functions like a sort of secret society with a common aesthetic, evident in the group’s original mantra, professed to outsiders wanting to join the club: “No one gets in, and no one gets out.” Meeting Wednesday nights, the Lodgers begin individual drawings and pass them along to the other artists in an altered style of the Surrealist “exquisite corpse.” This factory-like production of artworks—with its 20th-century precedent in Andy Warhol’s Factory—goes hand in hand with the inherently democratic nature of the activities. After a drawing is completed and date stamped, it is graded, sorted into one of five suitcases (on view in the show) and labelled with either a skull (for the worst drawings), The Sad Cloud, The Pink Heart-Face, The Sun Face or The Sun Face with Shield (reserved for the best drawings). The input of the more established artists—Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Jonathan Pylypchuk—never seems to overshadow the contributions of the much younger or less commercially successful.
Self-proclaimed as a mildly dysfunctional clique who simply likes to draw, the Art Lodge aims at pursuing a constant exploration of visual and written language. The drawings are like what poetry is to words or jazz is to music: the artists simply enjoy the processes of invention and making art and the resulting works have a refreshing, unpolished quality.
Some of the best drawings in the exhibition are those that would have failed were it not for an unexpected, often humorous and surreal combination of subjects. For example, in one drawing, posed in front of a watercolour sketch of the Parthenon is a cartoonish girl with her arm around a giant squid, all three elements in the work clearly drawn by different artists. In other successful pieces the final contribution of one artist seems to save a work from an unfortunate end in the “To Be Destroyed” suitcase. A drawing dated September 12, 2001, for example, portrays a tawny beige deer with a cat on his back and a mouse hanging out of his mouth, a tiny chair and bed at the deer’s feet. The drawing, like many in the show, treads close to being too cute, but is saved by the addition of a non sequitur. In this case the words “At the END of the day the Deer takes everybody home,” written across the top, tip the drawing into a weird, funny world typical of the Art Lodge.
The charming mixed-media explorations of The Royal Art Lodge are exemplified in 20 seven-inch-high dolls made by Michael Dumontier and Drue Langlois. These hybrids of animals, monsters and people were aggressively tacked to the wall. Each stuffed fabric creature has a tag attached to its arm with a quote, imaginatively attributed to the creature, written on the label. Anchovie, a cat-turtle-panda with pink puffy pom-pom cheeks, says perceptively, “Cuteness is sometimes merely a form of camouflage.” Other small dolls are displayed in a vitrine; a Dracula doll by Hollie Dzama is perhaps a response to Neil Farber’s Untitled (dracula is back) drawing. The puppet/dolls of Farber’s characters Jeffrey and Humphrey were used in numerous “Jeffrey and Humphrey” videos (made by Marcel Dzama and Farber), in which the puppets have poetry contests and tour the neighbourhood together. The characters are not only the property of Dzama and Farber; the remaining Lodge members collaborated on costumes of these endearingly dorky characters. These sculptural characters often appear in the drawings—just as the creatures in the drawings sometimes develop into masks or costumes. Tree Head exemplifies this. Designed by Marcel Dzama and made by Drue Langlois, it is a tree stump with eyes and twiggy appendages that appears in both Dzamas’ drawings and as a prop in The Royal Art Lodge collaborative videos. One of the most hilarious costumes is the Paper Shredder Platypus (a fun-fur platypus costume with a working paper shredder for its mouth), which similarly mirrors many of the hybrid creatures in the Lodge drawings.
A microcosm takes shape in the gallery. The entire world of the drawings has an unusual vibrancy. The viewer is made privy to a collective imagination that combines comic book–inspired characters and surreal narratives to freshly comment on the paradoxes of, and humour in, everyday life. We can’t help but delight in watching the action unfold.
Randy Gladman writes:
“I would like some bad-acting and wrong-thinking. I would like to see some art that is courageously silly and frivolous, that cannot be construed as anything else.” So wrote the art and culture critic Dave Hickey in an essay that appeared in Art issues during the summer of 1996. Though it is unlikely they were aware of this request, the young members of the Winnipeg-based drawing collective known as The Royal Art Lodge first formed in the same year and have worked collaboratively to unwittingly realize Mr. Hickey’s desire. Their group show at the prestigious Drawing Center in Manhattan, with nearly 500 works on display, proposes a reinvention of drawing itself by raising a simpleton’s understanding of the world above all other markers of value. “Ask the Dust,” curated by Wayne Baerwaldt and Joseph R. Wolin, travelled to Toronto’s Power Plant and De Vleeshal in the Dutch city of Middelburg.
The inventive and delightfully serendipitous drawings, sculptures and dolls in this show derive from a collaborative practice by the eight members of the group—Michael Dumontier, Hollie Dzama, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Myles Langlois, Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams. Frequently combining text and image and always offering visual narratives open to interpretation, these artists create post-surrealistic landscapes populated by simply and awkwardly rendered characters who question or fall victim to the lassitude of an imperfect, stupid and mean-spirited world. The ideas presented in these works seem to be fragments of fuller unrealized concepts and their charm and intelligence result from a complete disregard for the traditionally expected and accepted norms of draftsmanship, narrative completion and concern for the audience’s understanding. Just as Kurt Cobain’s influence repressed virtuosic instrumentation in rock music, the images in this exhibition subvert what we think a “good” drawing is supposed to be. Through sheer persistence of vision and practice, The Royal Art Lodge validate and qualify a truly childlike aesthetic.
There are many weak works on display that could have been edited without diminishing the scope of this examination of the group’s output. And the strongest works by the individual artists were not in this show, perhaps because of demands from their galleries (in New York, Dzama shows with David Zwirner, Pylypchuk with Friedrich Petzel and Farber with Clementine). But “Ask the Dust” as a whole joyously exposes a fresh and creative vision that brings to contemporary drawing the same kind of awkwardly geeky and shuffling brilliance Don McKellar’s films lend to cinema. Just as McKellar’s films negate the very existence of Hollywood’s cultural hegemony, the free-range work of The Royal Art Lodge provides scratching explorations and interrogations of a world oblivious to the grand expectations and ambitions of mainstream contemporary art.
Summer 2003
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